


The Face Death Forgot

by Lavanya_Six



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Complete, Female Protagonist, Gen, Immortality, Mortality, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-01
Updated: 2011-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:56:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavanya_Six/pseuds/Lavanya_Six
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For her one hundredth and nineteenth birthday, Kyoshi buries a much-loved grand-nephew of fifty and then leaves her village. Too many memories echoed in the faces of people's grandchildren and great-grandchildren.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Face Death Forgot

She is born the sixth child of farmers so poor they cannot afford to have her feet bound lest they lose a valuable field hand. By the time she is a woman grown, her feet are grotesquely huge. Nature is also unkind, denying her the markers of a proper Earth Kingdom beauty. At age eight she's as tall as her mother Koko. At twelve, she meets the eyes of her taller-than-average father. The summer of her thirteenth year she unexpectedly shoots up another foot, dwarfing everyone she's ever met. She keeps growing. Her mother, with more the intention of good humor than the result, comforts her with the observation that she'll never have to worry about drowning because her head will always be above water.

She excels at fighting. This is the age of outlaws, when people look to a tyrant named Chin for salvation from an oppressive yet inept government, only to find Chin is a _competent_ draconian ruler. Every able hand must defend the village from evil men. Because the Earth King has outlawed non-nobles from owning weapons or learning combat earthbending forms, her education is in the peasant laborer's plain sight arsenal: the truncheon, hoe, sickle, fishing oar, and folding fan. By age fourteen she learns all these tools to deadly effect, killing a dozen bandits in single raid after the adults flee. After that, people from across the province come to her for secret training, and their payments in food help pull her large family through a bad drought. The insults of 'freakish giant' and 'manlike' die away. Nobody but her family calls her by her given name anymore, she is known in hushed renown as the 'teaching master' - _Kyoshi._

At sixteen, on the Summer Solstice, she awakens from a dream knowing the truth about herself. While elsewhere venerable sages debate the missing Avatar and eye the growing stain of Chin's Empire on their maps, a moneyless hick from a village too remote to warrant a census taker packs her meager possessions, tucks a much-loved metal fan (a student's gift) into her belt, and heads to Omashu.

She is met with denials, derision, questioning and, finally, begrudging acceptance. An ugly, underclass savior is still a savior. Still the old insults return, flowing from her classmates' lips as surely as the spring snowmelt will from the mountaintops. Kyoshi - she doesn't use her real name, to protect her family from Chin's spies - knows she is strong enough to ignore them now.

Earthbending for war is not much different from earthbending as a farming tool: there is determination, vigilance, patience and, when the time is right, the harvest.

The years pass. She trains. Chin's domain grows.

Airbending is the hardest for her. They build a special glider for her large frame, and then build it again and again after she crashes them. Hitting the ground never hurts. How could it? She is the daughter of the Earth, a mountain shaped like a woman.

The greatest lesson from the Air Nomads is on the nature of history. They are the longest-lived of the Four Nations, old when even the fabled Sun Warriors were young. Above an ocean of humanity, their temples stand vigil: praying, meditating, recording.

"There will be another Chin," her teachers say, as she frets over the latest reports from the Siege of Ba Sing Se. "And another. And another. And just as surely as Kuruk lived and died, so will you beget the next Avatar. History flows like a river, sweeping us all along, repeating its course. Take comfort in this truth."

Her teachers will be dust before she questions them.

 

* *

 

When Chin's army arrives at her home peninsula, she goes alone and unannounced to meet him. Her face is painted white, just as she painted it as a child during those illegal weapon classes that now seem so long ago. Leaving aside her height, it does nothing to hide her identity. Nor does she intend it to. The face Kyoshi shows to her enemy is the face of the people Chin claims to be championing: the downtrodden peasant, forced to criminality to defend themselves.

Her first public act as Avatar is to protect her village a final time, separating it from the mainland.

Chin falls. His army splinters, as does his empire.

The Earth King and his loyal nobles, cowering behind Ba Sing Se's walls, demand justice. Chin stole their lands; it is only fair that the Avatar restore them. That is balance, they say.

Kyoshi disagrees. While Chin's surviving lieutenants are put to the sword for their rebellion, his provincial governors are not. Because while Chin was a tyrant, so too was the Earth King. What justice is there in trading one gang for another? Especially when Chin's chosen brought law and order to their provinces while the Earth King's chosen selfishly did not.

It takes hard years to put down the civil wars, the peasant uprisings, the nobility's proxy fights. But banditry declines. Deaths are more often non-violent than not, and taxes are paid.

The Earth Kingdom returns to balance.

 

* *

 

Time passes.

Kyoshi's people name their new island in her honor. When her duties do not take her elsewhere, she guards it. Being the home of the Avatar brings it both renown and danger, especially from the bitter settlers across the straight where Chin's most loyal followers established their own village. The threat of an Avatar's fury keeps them from enacting mass revenge, and her people are proficient enough to fend off the smaller-scale attacks when she is seeing to her worldly duties.

Among the Earth Kingdom's new nobility, it becomes fashionable for their daughters to go with unbound feet. While Kyoshi appreciates the tribute, she likes more seeing female earthbenders like herself go unmaimed, able to develop their talents. It is a fad, she tells herself, but enjoys that her monstrous feet are a little less unusual a sight.

 

* *

 

On the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, the Fire Lord honors her with an polished dragonscale hand mirror. For novelty's sake, she tries applying her ubiquitous war paint in front of it. Kyoshi is shocked to find the barefaced woman staring back at her looks closer to twenty-five than fifty. Her crow's feet are small and her gray hairs sparse.

Remarkably well preserved, her wrinkled childhood friends tell her later.

 

* *

 

She makes it to sixty-three before she can't deny there's a problem.

Her parents are long dead. Her siblings are silver-haired and walk with stoops. Yet the reflection in her hand mirror hasn't aged a day. The Earth Sages tell her that the chi within her is **strong** but not to worry. "Time is like a river," they say, "and it carries us all to our final destination in due course. Be patient."

She tries. She really does.

 

* *

 

For her one hundredth and nineteenth birthday, Kyoshi buries a much-loved grand-nephew of fifty and then leaves her village. Too many memories echoed in the faces of people's grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

On the mainland, Chin's chosen have taken up the airs of the old houses. Kyoshi is struck by the realization that few other than her remember the less-than-noble origins of the Pangs and Bei Fongs and dozens of other families. Only a few Ba Sing Se diehards still bind their daughters' feet. A fad has become fashion, and fashion custom.

She fights. She trains others. She moves on and puts her students' faces out of her mind.

It passes the time.

The mirror she leaves buried on the island.

 

* *

 

Sometime in her late 160s, a Water Tribe girl interrupts Kyoshi during a waterbending lesson when she mentions Kuruk.

"Who's he?"

"The Avatar before me."

" _Before_ you?"

 

* *

 

At 203, for a change of pace, Kyoshi returns home and sets aside a few decades to marry. The man is a simple fisherman. He is kind and his face doesn't resemble anyone she remembers. Surprisingly, despite looking to be in her late forties, she produces a daughter, Koko.

Watching her child grow is a joy, but ever-present is the knowledge that she will soon bury Koko too.

Everyone is swept along by the river of time. Everyone except Kyoshi.

Not for the first time, she wishes she were a head shorter.

 

* *

 

Koko, like her grandmother, grows to be a diminutive woman. "I wish I was as big as you, Mama."

"No, you don't."

 

* *

 

And suddenly one morning, at 230, it _hurts_ getting out of bed.

The islanders are appalled by how fast she deteriorates. Kyoshi the Immortal, some have called her. But newly whitened hair and arthritic hands that can't even unfurl a war fan put an end to the title. Never a vain woman, she still asks Koko to dig up that ancient mirror. The image it shows her - deep set wrinkles, drooping skin, hair thinning by the day - astounds her.

Kyoshi never imagined that a drowning woman could look so beautiful.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] The Face Death Forgot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/569116) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




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